Financing A New Frontier
Drawing of a Creek Indian village on the Apalachicola River by Francis de Castelnau, ca. 1838. Hundreds of Indigenous peoples
lived in the area when Tallahassee was established as territorial capital in 1824.
Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida
Native peoples, such as the Apalachee, Muscogee Creek, Miccosukee, and their immediate ancestors practiced large-scale agriculture in the Tallahassee area centuries before Europeans and Africans arrived. After Florida became an American territory in 1821, wealthy planters migrated to the area from the upper South. They traveled in large caravans with their extended families and the enslaved people they claimed as their property. Ambitious planters often financed the expensive move to the plantation frontier by selling enslaved people, permanently separating them from their families.
Tallahassee street scene as depicted by Francis de Castelnau in 1839
Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida
Most of these planters could not bring their new land into full cultivation because North Florida was cash poor. As the cotton industry boomed in the 1820s and early 1830s, Florida drew interest from northern and European capitalists, who wanted to invest in the region. To facilitate these outside investments, Governor William P. DuVal advocated for the establishment of a planter’s bank. John Gamble, a merchant from Richmond, and other Tallahassee-area planters banded together to form a bank to finance their plantations and other developments, such as railroads and ports. Florida’s Legislative Council chartered the Union Bank of Florida in 1833, and the bank opened for business in 1835 in a building known as The Columns. Today, this building, originally on Adams Street, now stands on Duval Street as Tallahassee’s oldest surviving structure.
Construction of a new building to house the Union Bank began in 1840 and was completed in March 1841. The builder, David F. Wilson, died shortly after the structure, then located next to The Columns on Adams Street, was finished. A lawsuit over Wilson’s estate noted that he built the bank with his “servants” (enslaved people), including a 33-year-old carpenter named Davy. Davy represents hundreds of skilled enslaved Black craftspeople, including brickmakers, carpenters, and plasterers, who built territorial Tallahassee.
The Columns, ca. 1890s
Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida
